Chapter Eleven

After…

London. We’d go to London.

Nate spent a few days plotting our course on his map and marking places to avoid. He said there were bad things he didn’t want me to see, although he never disclosed what those things were. I told him he couldn’t possibly shelter me from it all. Besides, he’d no idea what to expect the closer to London we got as he’d never managed to travel that far.

I guessed he would rather not see those things either.

London was almost two-hundred-and-fifty kilometers from ‘Siren Bay,’ and Nate estimated we’d cover around thirty kilometers a day. By the time we left, it’d be September, a little cooler than the last few months, making the heat less of a problem. Even now, when the sun went down, a slight chill hung in the air, and I found myself reaching for one of Nate’s hoodies when we took our evening walks.

We’d both have to carry full rucksacks now, which would slow us down, but he suggested that we loot bicycles from somewhere if it became an issue. Unfortunately, the more southeast we went, the more uphill everything would become, making bikes of limited use.

I’d begun to think this journey was a bad idea, but Nate actually developed some enthusiasm for the trip, whereas my keenness had wavered. The thought of walking so far made me feel lethargic just thinking about it. I wasn’t sleeping very well either, one thing or another kept me awake at night—I worried about Rebecca, but I worried even more about Nate’s state of mind. How would seeing all that death again affect him?

Last night, I’d tossed and turned well into the early hours of the morning until my anxiety became so unbearable that I threw up repeatedly, leaving me with a perpetual headache that wouldn’t dissipate. Somehow, I’d have to find a way to put my anxieties aside before I drove myself mad.

We packed everything we’d feasibly need, keeping food provisions to a minimum. Nate didn’t seem to think there’d be too much of a problem finding something to eat each day—if we couldn’t loot something, he’d catch us a fish or a rabbit for dinner. He approached each potential problem with a cool, logical head, offering reassurance whenever I looked apprehensive. I guessed it was the doctor in him.

“We’ll go to London,” he’d said, with a grin. “At the very least, we’ll do a little sightseeing. Then we’ll head to Rebecca’s.”

Sure, why not? I’d always wanted to see the houses of parliament.

The evening before we were due to depart, I sat on the veranda, on a blanket, and watched the sun go down, taking mental photographs as though I was never going to see this place again—which was ridiculous—but, I still couldn’t shake the unease off.

I was grateful when Nate came outside with a bottle of expensive-looking champagne and sat down beside me. He popped the cork and then poured us a large glass each. A rush of bubbles tickled the back of my throat as I took a sip. I wasn’t a massive fan of champagne but figured it might help me relax enough to get some sleep.

“I don’t want to go.”

He gave me a dimpled grin. “Yes, you do.”

“I do, and I don’t.”

He laughed. “We’ll be back soon enough, and then we’ll have winter to look forward to. Trust me, it can get a little bleak here when it’s cold—not so picturesque. It’s not the paradise you think it is.”

“I didn’t come here for the scenery,” I said, giving him a wink.

He threw his head back. “What can I say to that? I hope you give me a favorable review online.”

“Four and a half gold stars,” I chuckled.

He frowned. “Why not five? I’ve kept up with your sexual demands, haven’t I?”

I almost spat out my champagne. “My demands?”

He licked his lips and smirked. “I blame myself entirely. I’ve created a monster.”

“Whatever,” I said, rolling my eyes, and he kissed me before I could throw any more sarcastic comments his way. Minutes later, we were making love on the veranda.

This time it felt different. Perhaps because we were leaving tomorrow, and it’d be a while before we could do this again here. I’d really miss this place, but as long as Nate and I were together, we’d be okay. He was my home. Being with him reminded me that the world wasn’t all bad and we could still be happy, despite everything.

As though he savored every second, Nate moved his body in a way that felt like he was tempting me, drawing out each movement to the very edge and then gradually, deeply, bringing us together again. When it became impossible to hold back any longer, I moaned and held onto him as tightly as I could. Flushed and breathless, we fell away from each other.

“Nicely done,” I said.

He rolled over onto his side to face me and propped his head up with his hand. “Now do I get five stars?”

I glowered at him in mock indignation. “Fine.”

****

Reluctantly, we left the cabin behind.

A fine drizzle had begun to fall from an ominous gray sky just as Nate turned off the electricity and locked up. I dragged my feet a little as we walked through the wood, past the other caravans, but Nate took my hand and squeezed it in the reassuring way that he often did.

Feeling more positive, I put it down to Nate’s mood, which remained upbeat despite my misgivings. Maybe he did need to do this as much as I did.

“I would like to know what happened to them,” Nate said.

“What?” Lost in contemplation, I’d not heard much of the conversation.

“The other people who survived the virus,” he repeated, “I’d like to know what happened to them.”

“Didn’t you say there was a survivor at your hospital?” I asked.

Nate nodded. “Yeh. A woman. Right at the beginning, when we were still allowed to treat the infected.”

The Infected. Sounded very much like a zombie horror to me, only there were no ravenous, brain-eating monsters in this B-movie. Thank Christ.

Once the hospitals had become over-run with the infected, they’d been forced to shut their doors while they dealt with their current patients—or rather, while they moved the corpses taking up bed space. Nate had previously explained to me that once the virus was discovered to be airborne, I.D.R.I.S had stepped in and ordered the hospitals to deny admittance to anyone with the virus. Despite the extra precautions though, most of the medical staff got sick soon after, Nate included.

“An ambulance brought her and her kids in—three boys, all under five years old,” he continued. “She was the only one that pulled through. I had to tell her.”

“Bloody hell,” was all I could respond with.

Occasionally, Nate would come out with something truly harrowing. He really had seen the worst of it. Although, as a doctor, it probably wasn’t the first time he’d been the bearer of awful news or witnessed terrible tragedy. Maybe it was the very reason he’d been able to remain strong for so long.

“What happened to her?” I asked.

“I.D.R.I.S moved her to an army hospital somewhere. I fought them on it though. She was too weak to be transported anywhere. They took her anyway.”

A chill traveled up my spine. “That seems wrong.”

“They were desperate to find out how to stop the virus,” Nate said, “But, yes, it seemed strange to me, her being spirited away like that. I tried to find out how she was doing, being my patient and all, but they wouldn’t tell me anything.”

I frowned. “But, if she survived, where is she?”

His tone was ominous. “Exactly.”

What had been done with—and to—the survivors? What lengths had I.D.R.I.S gone to for a cure? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

As we started up the slope leading to the cliff top, Nate shifted his backpack into a more comfortable position, the perspiration already forming on his forehead from carrying the heaviest bag.

“I heard rumors, you know,” he continued.

I cocked my head. “Rumors?”

“The hospital coordinator was a friend of mine. I dated his sister in college, and sometimes we’d all meet up for drinks after work. Brett Franklin, his name was.” Nate smirked as if he remembered something pleasant for a change. “Couldn’t hold his drink.”

“Anyway, it was his job to liaise with I.D.R.I.S. We had to send all our test results and blood samples off to them. As things got worse, we were all exhausted from working round the clock. One night, I found him in his office with a bottle of vodka; he was wasted. I tried to sober him up with some coffee, but then he started ranting. He said I.D.R.I.S had a cure but weren’t going to use it. I thought it was bull at the time—the drunken ramblings of a man stressed to his limits. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.”

I stopped abruptly, my mouth agape. “If they had a cure, why wouldn’t they use it?”

“That’s exactly what I asked him. Apparently, he’d overheard a conversation between one of the army commanders stationed at the hospital and an I.D.R.I.S rep. The commander was questioning why ‘certain plans’ had been delayed.”

“What plans?”

“Brett seemed to think I.D.R.I.S intended to infect the population with a survivable strain of the virus. He surmised that the virus had mutated in survivors, and infecting people with this strain was the only way to save them.”

I stared at him in disbelief, but in the back of my mind, it made perfect sense. We’d all been promised a vaccine was only days away from being distributed, but then…nothing. Was it a lie to placate the people? Or had something gone wrong?

I shook my head. “If a cure existed, they’d have given it to us.”

Nate shrugged. “Not if the cost was too high.”

“What do you mean?”

“Infecting everyone with a different strain of the virus isn’t exactly a cure. There would still be fatalities in people who weren’t physically able to survive the effects of having the virus—same as those people who die from the flu. And what about the side effects? Like making everyone infertile? No way would the government let I.D.R.I.S distribute such a vaccine.”

“But, even so, more people would be alive now if they had,” I growled.

Nate gave a solemn nod. “I did wonder, when it got really bad, why they didn’t use it anyway. Like you said, at least people would’ve lived.”

I sighed. “Maybe it was too late by then.”

“Or maybe there was another reason.”

“Like?”

Nate scratched his head. “No idea. I guess we’ll never know.”

“Guess not,” I mumbled, puffing as the slope inclined.

We soon reached the cliff-top and headed over to the group of vehicles I’d seen parked here when I first arrived. Nate had mentioned earlier needing to get something from his car, although he didn’t say what, and I couldn’t imagine where he’d put it, given how jam-packed our rucksacks were.

Nate turned to me with a grin as he approached the cars. “Only one of these is mine. The rest I stole from a dealership in the village. It was easier to drive cars with full tanks of fuel, rather than filling up at petrol stations. Plus, when the power went off, the fuel pumps locked off too. And who knew fuel had such a short use-by date?”

Indeed, there was a long list of things that would’ve been useful to know before the world ended.

Our previous conversation suddenly got me wondering, had the media lied to us about the virus? Or had they been lied to by I.D.R.I.S?

When people started getting sick, we were told it was nothing to panic over. Everyone carried on with life as if none of it was really happening. They kept on going to work, and they did their Christmas shopping as they did every year, stocking up on the champagne for New Year’s too. They did everything the television and the news had told them to do—keep calm and carry on. Only when a few thousand deaths turned into one billion, did people start to panic. Until that point, we’d all just waited around for the cure, eyes glued to our televisions for a good news announcement.

I still couldn’t quite let go of my anger, even though none of this stuff mattered anymore. Dwelling on the past would do me no good, especially when the present was so much more appealing.

Here I was, walking hand in hand with the man I loved. Ironic as it was, taking an apocalypse for me to find true happiness.

“You okay?” Nate asked.

Turning my attention back to him, I leaned in to kiss his cheek. “I’m good.”

Nate flashed me a smile and then went around to the rear of an expensive-looking silver hatchback and lifted the boot. He rummaged around for a bit while I drew a smiley face in the dirt on the passenger window. Like all the other vehicles, the paintwork had begun to peel and crack from the constant battering of the elements up here, and the sea air was slowly rusting the metal on the door creases. Despite the heavy rain over the last few weeks, the years of grime build-up remained ingrained on the windows and around the lower half of the car. I continued drawing little patterns with my index finger until I saw Nate throw a small rifle over his shoulder.

“A gun?” I shot him an unsure look.

“It’s mostly for shooting rabbits,” he said.

Mostly. I thought about the wolf I’d encountered on the way here, and despite my dislike of guns, it seemed sensible to carry a weapon capable of packing more punch than a crowbar.

Nate continued rummaging in the boot, eventually pulling out a box of bullets which he slipped into the side pocket of his rucksack, and then he produced a hunting knife which got clipped onto the belt of his jeans. Oddly, I found it a little bit sexy.

Wandering round to the rear of the car to where he stood, I peeked into the boot, shocked to see it contained a neatly organized collection of weaponry and hunting accessories.

“Is that a crossbow?” I asked, leaning forward to examine a weapon wrapped partially in a small blanket.

“Yes,” he said. “Overkill for hunting bunnies, though. I’m also an appalling shot.”

I frowned. “It’s quite an arsenal you have here.”

“Well, when I looted all this stuff, I had no idea what to use and how to use it,” he explained.

“So, you’re a self-taught serial killer?” I chuckled, but he shot me an intensely disapproving glare.

“Actually, I hate it. It’s why I don’t keep any of it in the cabin.”

I put an arm around his waist and laid my head on his shoulder. “I understand.”

He kissed the top of my head and then shut the boot down. That’s when I caught sight of the number plate, my eyes flicking repeatedly over the last three letters—NMR.

Silver car. NMR.

No, it couldn’t be.

“NMR,” I whispered.

Nate looked at me. “Personalized plate. Bit ostentatious, I know. Nathanial Mark Reynolds.”

I’d never asked his full name before. I swallowed hard and leaned back against the car, my head swimming.

Nate frowned. He put his hands up to my face and tilted my chin up to look at him. “What? What’s wrong?”

Dazed, I finally managed to speak. “I’m…so sorry.”

He paled a little. “For what?”

I blinked. “I saw you.”

“When?”

My voice grew hoarse, my heart thumping in anguish. “In Cornwall. Near Liskeard. You were there, weren’t you?”

In my mind, the image of his map flashed before me. All of those little marks he’d made had been so near to us at the cottage.

“Uh, I don’t know. Early on, I guess. But it’s pretty rural there, and I just passed through,” Nate answered.

Nodding soberly, I buried my head in his chest, gripping his t-shirt in my hands. “I saw you.”

He shook his head in disbelief.

“I saw you,” I whispered again. “And I let you go.”

****

Before…

Somehow, I survived.

Rebecca, unlike me, didn’t contract the virus, despite staying by my bedside while the infection seared through my body.

I couldn’t recall very much after the fever started; other than the moments I woke up in pain. A searing heat in my veins so excruciating that I wished for death. Thankfully, after a minute or two of anguish, I passed out.

As the pain inside my body eased, my skin burned instead, like I’d caught on fire. I remembered screaming, and Rebecca holding me down—nothing like what I’d seen happen to Andrew, who’d perished quickly after developing the fever.

Five months had passed since the outbreak, and our supplies began to dwindle again. Rebecca and I argued for days over who should be the one to go into town, but she hid her car keys and refused point-blank to let me go alone or to accompany her, claiming it’d be safer for me to stay here.

“Safer than what?” I snapped.

“We don’t know who, or what, is out there!” she snapped back.

“What are you afraid of? Flesh-eating zombies?”

“No,” she said. “It’s the human monsters that I worry about.”

Like Andrew, I thought.

The night before she left, I struggled to sleep, alternating between a fear of being alone and worrying something terrible would happen to her while she was gone. It amounted to the same thing really.

I got up just after sunrise and walked through the empty village until I reached the edge of the A390, which was about as far as I’d ventured recently.

Andrew had died here. This was the exact spot where I’d left his body to rot, and I didn’t care to see what remained of him. This time, however, I plucked up enough courage to go beyond the invisible barrier I’d created and out onto the highway.

His body wasn’t there, although a faint bloodstain still discolored the asphalt. For one horrible second, I panicked, thinking he might not really be dead, but his car was still in the same place on the hard shoulder. It was far more likely that some hungry animal had dragged his carcass away somewhere and dined on it. The notion of him being eaten up brought a smile to my lips, followed by a pang of remorse for even thinking such a horrid thing. Still, a fitting end to such a vile human, in my opinion.

Standing on the grassy curb, I looked up and down the road, my eyes sweeping over the fields and out to the horizon. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I lingered there for a long while before heading back.

The lane back to the cottage was long and narrow, lined by an ancient, hawthorn hedgerow obscuring anything beyond it. At first, I thought I was hearing things, but as it came closer, I recognized the sound of a car engine and the whir of tires on asphalt. I spun around and ran back up to the main road, my heart beating hard against my ribcage. Before I managed to reach the end of the little country lane, the vehicle passed by in a flash of silver. I darted out onto the highway about ten seconds later and sprinted after the car as it sped along, oblivious to my presence. All I could make out were the bold, black letters on the yellow number plate, shrinking as the car moved further and further away.

Something…7…2…NMR.

I raced down the middle of the road, screaming until my throat was sore and waving like a castaway on a desert island upon seeing a ship.

It was no use, though, because the car was out of sight in a matter of seconds.

Undeterred, I ran back to the cottage and roused my aunt from sleep by shaking her awake.

“I saw someone!” I panted. “In a car. Just now. If we hurry, we might catch them!”

Rebecca simply glared at me.

“I tried to stop them, but they didn’t see me,” I added.

“That was stupid!” she barked. “What the hell were you thinking?”

I was taken back by her anger. “What?”

She huffed and swung her legs out of her bed. “Halley, I told you, it isn’t safe! We don’t know who those people are or what they might do!”

Her statement left me gobsmacked. “But, we…”

She raised her palm to silence me. “I mean it! It’s not safe.”

My blood boiled. If she’d wanted to protect me from harm, it was a little too fucking late. Frustrated, I left her bedroom with clenched fists and an overwhelming urge to punch something.

I thought about the silver car for the rest of the day, lingering around by the highway in the hope they’d come back.

Each morning, I walked down to where I’d seen it. Sometimes, I’d go in the evenings too.

Every day. For six months.

In the end, I told myself they were probably dead now.

Whoever it was, they were long gone and out of my reach.